The days were golden, the nights were dim and strange. I still
recall with trembling those loud, nocturnal crises when you drew up
to a signpost and raced the engine so the lights would be bright
enough to read destinations by. I have never been really planetary
since. I suppose it’s time to say goodbye. Farewell, my lovely!

Fordism would seem to survive only in the form of abandoned
ruins and post-industrial landscapes that bear testament to an era
as monumental as it was contested, fragile, and now forever past.
The very term comes enveloped with a retrospective valence, evoking
a bygone period that will never again (must never again?) be
recuperated. And yet, some of Fordism’s most paradigmatic
institutions continue to bring forth powerful affective
attachments. Across the globe, people are mourning an era that
carved its indelible marks upon the affective topographies of
entire populations. For some, these marks consisted of the promise
of relative economic security and well-being, plausible middle
class aspirations, and a sense of linear biographical legibility;
for others, it was personal and political futurities that allowed
for an orientation toward safety and affluence, the hopes that such
futurities spawned, and the practical, quotidian investments that
were elaborated under their spell. For others still, it entailed
the figure of a strong state, robust unionism, or the normative
order of a heterosexual patriarchy.

The variegated modes of remembering, forgetting, grieving, and
longing for these past horizons show multiple shades of
ambivalence. On the one hand, we find a whole range of ways—some
clamorous, others all-but-untraceable—in which people across the
globe mourn, or struggle to resuscitate, certain moments of the
Fordist dream. At the same time, to paraphrase Freud’s (1953)
comments on melancholia, it all-too-often appears as if we know
what we have lost but not what we have lost
in Fordism.1 Indeed, peoples’
attempts to recover or at least approximate Fordist forms and
feelings of stability and belonging—as well as some of our own
scholarly reflections on this phenomenon, we might add—all too
often appear uncannily akin to the melancholic
condition.2

The articles collected in this special issue aim to explore
these landscapes of post-Fordist affect (Berlant 2007). They
thus aim at those senses and sensitivities that have emerged in the
wake of the dissolution of the Fordist social contract through
market fundamentalism and that, while achingly present, are often
discursively unavailable.3 In this sense, we
think of Fordism not only as a distinctive regime of accumulation
that characterized the industrial world for large parts of the 20th
century, but also as a field of influence that extended itself both
spatially and temporally. We survey the sometimes unexpected ways
in which people mourn the passing of this era, as well as the
subtle forms in which post-Fordist affect speaks to Fordism’s
lingering presence, to the absence of historical closure, to the
haunting of the present by a host of attachments, commitments,
investments, and aspirations4—in other words, to
Fordism as unfinished business. Some of that ambivalence can be
glimpsed in the sometimes nostalgic, sometimes euphoric, sometimes
ironic elegy with which Elwyn Brooks White bid farewell to the
Model T, the first mass produced automobile that everyman could
afford:

It was the miracle God had wrought. And it was patently the sort
of thing that could only happen once. Mechanically uncanny, it was
like nothing that had ever come to the world before. Flourishing
industries rose and fell with it. As a vehicle, it was
hard-working, commonplace, heroic; and it often seemed to transmit
those qualities to the persons who rode in it. My own generation
identifies it with Youth, with its gaudy, irretrievable
excitements; before it fades into the mist, I would like to pay it
the tribute of the sigh that is not a sob, and set down random
entries in a shape somewhat less cumbersome than a Sears Roebuck
catalogue.

(1936:20)

White’s eulogy reveals how Fordism brought forth strange
creations whose claims far surpassed mechanical instrumentality. As
creatures with a life and spirit of their own, they
insinuated...

You must be logged in through an institution that subscribes to this journal or book to access the full text.

Shibboleth

Shibboleth authentication is only available to registered institutions.

Welcome to Project MUSE

Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page. Click the Browse box to see a selection of books and journals by: Research Area, Titles A-Z, Publisher, Books only, or Journals only.